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Category: News
Latest news
The Irish Association for American Studies is calling for nominations for the following
positions on the Executive Committee:
Postgraduate caucus co-chair x 2
ECR caucus chair or co-chair (x 1 OR x 2)
Vice Chair
Please note that in accordance with the ethos of the IAAS, the committee especially
welcomes nominations for members from under-represented groups, backgrounds, and
ethnicities.
Ideally, we are looking for executive committee members who have experience and
familiarity with our activities, ideals, and membership. There are many ways to get involved
with the IAAS, and new members are very welcome at Association events.
- Nominations must be made by a member of the IAAS
- Nominees must be members of the IAAS
- We accept self-nominations
- All nominations will need to be seconded by an IAAS member
- All executive committee members, aside from fulfilling duties specific to their role,
will be expected to attend all IAAS committee meetings throughout the year (there
are usually 5 meetings per annum) - The positions will be elected by members of the IAAS during the AGM (28th April
2023, University of Limerick) - Please email your nominations or any queries to our Secretary Dr Sarah McCreedy,
at info@iaas.ie by 14th April 2023.
Postgraduate caucus co-chair general responsibilities:
- Attendance at all IAAS committee meetings
- Attendance at IAAS events, where appropriate
- Assistance with widening the reach of the IAAS via own networks
- Working with their fellow Postgraduate caucus co-chair to provide a report at
committee meetings on activities and feedback from the Postgraduate members of
the IAAS - Running, with their fellow co-chair and with the support of the IAAS committee, the
annual IAAS Postgraduate symposium (October/November). - The term of the appointment is two years, renewable. It is usually recommended
that the PG caucus co-chairs are in their second+ year of postgraduate study.
ECR caucus chair or co-chair general responsibilities:
- Attendance at all IAAS committee meetings
- Attendance at IAAS events
- Working to implement initiatives aimed at benefitting the experience of American
Studies early career academics on the island of Ireland and beyond - Working to raise the profile and membership of the IAAS among early career
networks - Organising an ECR-focused panel/workshop/roundtable at the annual IAAS
conference - The term of the appointment is two years, renewable.
Vice Chair general responsibilities:
- Attendance at all IAAS committee meetings
- Attendance at IAAS events, and providing support where needed
- Submitting prizes and other relevant news reports at committee meetings
- Assistance with widening the reach of the IAAS via own networks
- Recruiting and chairing prizes sub-committee
- Prizes marketing and administration
- Contributing to prizes and bursaries judging where a casting vote is needed
- Liaising with winners and with Treasurer for announcements and payments, etc.
- Administering biannual Book Prize submissions
- Assisting Chair with administrative and leadership tasks
- Deputising for Chair when needed
Irish Association for American Studies
Annual Conference
“In/Security”
University of Limerick
Hybrid event: virtual and in-person
28-29 April 2023
The Irish Association for American Studies is an all-island scholarly association dedicated to promoting interdisciplinary American Studies in Ireland. It invites paper and panel proposals for its 2023 Annual Conference, which will take place 28-29 April at the University of Limerick. The hybrid event will be the first IAAS Annual Conference since 2019 to include an in-person element.
“There are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know. This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violent act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact” (Judith Butler, Precarious Life xii).
The theme for the 2023 IAAS Annual Conference is “In/Security.” Inderpal Grewal argues that “constructs of security have come to dominate everyday life in the US imperial state” (Saving the Security State 2). Certainly, questions of security have dominated the US news agenda this year, from the inquest into the breach of the Capitol on 6 January 2021; to geopolitical threats of energy shortages, a cost-of-living crisis, cyber-attacks, and nuclear war; to the FBI’s retrieval of documents endangering national security from a former President’s home. Actual and perceived threats to security – personal, institutional, and technological – have increasingly become the norm in US politics, as allegations of voting fraud and campaigns of intimidation continue to reverberate across elections. Meanwhile, the rising risks of wildfires and storms are a reminder that climate change represents an existential threat to human society that requires us to act now to secure a liveable future.
This year, we invite proposals that consider security, safety, defence, and protection, as well as their opposites: insecurity, precarity, vulnerability, and danger. We will think about security at various scales, the various senses and feelings of terms like “security” and “safe,” and the different ways in which notions of security and its absence structure cultural, social, political, and economic discourses in the Americas.
We welcome papers from all disciplines in American Studies, broadly defined. Possible paper and panel topics may include but are not limited to:
- Texts and events that dramatize questions of (in)security at various scales: personal, societal, national, global
- Levels and forms of security forces, threats, risks, defences, protections, allies, and immunities
- Senses (meanings and feelings) of security and insecurity, vulnerability, and precarity
- Resource (food, water, energy, housing) security and insecurity, and the geopolitics of resource security
- Securing the (environmental, biodiverse, just) future; risking the future
- Financial securities and insecurities
- Job security, precarity, safety nets, and their absence; welfare and wellbeing
- Technologies of security – drones, doorbells, digital systems – and their ownership
- Home security, domestic threats, and safe spaces; private security, personal safety, and safekeeping
- Questions and definitions of care: carefree (secure, from the Latin securus, meaning without care), careless, and caregiving
The conference organisers welcome individual proposals or panel proposals. Individual participants should submit abstracts of no more than 300 words for a 20-minute paper. Panel proposals will normally consist of an overall proposal of 200 words, plus individual abstracts of no more than 150 words for each of 3 papers for 1½-hour sessions. However, proposals for innovative, alternative panel formats are also encouraged. All proposals should include a short academic biography (50-100 words) for each presenter. Please also indicate if you prefer to attend online or if you are able to attend in person. Priority for online presentations will be reserved for those with accessibility issues or those who are outside of Ireland. Due to limited capacity, we may not be able to meet all requests for online presentations.
Papers from all disciplines in American Studies are welcome, including literary studies, history, politics, economics, geography, science, philosophy, media studies, film studies, photography, art, music and dance, cultural studies, international relations, and others, and from any theoretical or practical perspective. The IAAS and the Annual Conference are dedicated to equality, diversity, and inclusion, and we welcome papers from under-represented groups. The deadline for submissions, to IAAS2023@ul.ie, is 31 January 2023.
All presenters at the Annual Conference must be members of the IAAS. More information is available here: https://iaas.ie/memberships/.
The 2023 IAAS Annual Conference will be hosted by University of Limerick and run by Tim Groenland, David Coughlan, and Clair Sheehan. For more information, contact us at IAAS2023@ul.ie.
The IAAS are delighted to announce the winner of this year’s WTM Riches Essay Prize. Christina McCambridge, an MA student at Queen’s University Belfast, has been selected as the overall winner for her essay entitled “‘Music dismantles history’: A Postcolonial Reading of Musicality and Temporality in the Chamber Poetics of T.S. Eliot and Ishion Hutchinson.”
The WTM Riches Essay Prize is awarded annually for outstanding work in any area of American Studies by undergraduate students and students in the first year of postgraduate studies. More information, including past winners, can be found here.
2023 Research Fellowships at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture
The Virginia Museum of History & Culture (VMHC) offers research fellowships of up to three weeks a year to promote the interpretation of Virginia and access to its collections. Thanks to a matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and generous gifts from individuals, fellowships carry a weekly stipend of $1,000 and $500 for local mileage. A week is defined as five days in the Mr. and Mrs. E. Claiborne Robins, Jr. Research Library, which is open 10am to 5pm, Monday through Saturday. The deadline for applications is Friday, January 27, 2023. For information about the research fellowships and how to apply for 2023, please visit the following page on the VMHC website: https://virginiahistory.org/research/research-resources/research-support
Contact Info:
Dr. James Brookes, Melanie Trent De Schutter Library Director
Virginia Museum of History & Culture
P.O. Box 7311
Richmond, VA 23221-0311
Telephone: 804.342.9663
Heidelberg Center for American Studies 20th Annual Spring Academy Conference
Heidelberg, Germany, 20–24 March, 2023
*Call for Papers *
The twentieth HCA Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion will be held from March 20-24, 2023. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects.
The HCA Spring Academy invites participants to work closely with experts in their respective fields of study and offers workshops held by visiting scholars.
We encourage applications that pursue an interdisciplinary approach and range broadly across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Papers can be presented on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. Possible topics include American identity, issues of ethnicity, gender, transatlantic relations, U.S. domestic and foreign policy, economics, as well as various aspects of American history, literature, religion, geography, law, musicology, and culture. Proposals should include a preliminary title and run to no more than 300 words.
Participants are requested to prepare a 20-minute presentation of their research project, which will be followed by a 40-minute discussion. The presentations will be arranged into ten panel groups.
In addition to cross-disciplinary and international discussions during the panel sessions, the Spring Academy aims at creating a pleasant collegial atmosphere for further scholarly exchange and contact.
Accommodation will be provided by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.
Thanks to a small travel fund, the Spring Academy is able to subsidize travel expenses for participants registered and residing in soft-currency countries. Scholarship applicants will need to document the necessity for financial aid and explain how they plan to cover any potentially remaining expenses. In addition, a letter of recommendation from their doctoral advisor is required.
START OF APPLICATION PROCESS: August 15, 2022
DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS: November 15, 2022
SELECTIONS WILL BE MADE BY: January 2023
PLEASE USE OUR ONLINE APPLICATION SYSTEM: www.hca-springacademy.de
MORE INFORMATION: www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de
FOR FURTHER QUESTIONS: springacademy@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
We are delighted to announce our Summer Bursary Winners!
Our Early-Career Conference Bursary Winner was Dr. Alan Carmody, while our Postgraduate Conference Bursary Winners were Máiréad Casey and Bowen Wang.
Congratulations, all!
The Irish Association for American Studies is delighted to announce that the esteemed Dr Dara Downey will be delivering our 2022 W. A. Emmerson lecture in person, in the Neill Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.
Dr Downey will be presenting on her current research, the highly anticipated literary biography of Shirley Jackson. Her lecture is titled: ‘Mainstreaming Shirley Jackson: Resurrecting a Cold-War Author in the Post-Trump Age’.
Dr Downey will be introduced by Dr Bernice Murphy, Associate Professor in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, whose work on American horror and gothic narratives is widely acclaimed.
All are welcome to this event, although booking is required. Seating is limited, so please register for a seat at the lecture at your earliest convenience.
The IAAS code of conduct applies to this event and all IAAS events.
In the interests of public safety and in light of sharply rising COVID-19 numbers, the IAAS asks that all attendees wear masks to this event. To sign up for the event, click here.
About the speaker:
Dr Dara Downey lectures in English in Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City University. She is the author of American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (2014), editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, and co-editor (with Ian Kinane and Elizabeth Parker) of Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (2016). She has published widely on American Gothic fiction and popular culture, on authors from Charles Brockden Brown to Tananarive Due, and is currently writing a literary biography of Shirley Jackson for Palgrave Macmillan’s Literary Lives series.
About the W. A. Emmerson Annual Lecture:
Beginning in 2014, the IAAS Lecture is an annual event, hosted at a third level institution on the island of Ireland, and presented by an invited member of the IAAS on a topic of their choosing. In 2015, the lecture was renamed the W. A. Emmerson Lecture, in honour of our much-loved late Treasurer. Broad in its remit, the IAAS Lecture appeals to both academic and non-academic communities, and promotes the long-standing interest in and connection to American culture in Ireland.
SHOULDN’T YOU BE WRITING?!
WRITE ALONG WITH OUR POSTGRADUATE MEMBERS!
Starting August 30th, the Postgraduate Caucus co-chairs of the IAAS, Janice Deitner and Andrew Clarke, will be hosting a write along session on Discord.
Information on the poster opposite. You can drop us a line at our Facebook page or on Twitter too for more info! @TheIAAS
The European Association for American Studies announces a new 15,000 EUR Scholars-at-Risk grant program. We will be offering grants of up to 2,000 EUR to scholars working within the field of American Studies who find themselves in a situation of precarity. Given the life threatening nature of war, in the 2022 edition of the grant, priority will be given to scholars with Ukrainian citizenship.
The grant is intended to cover expenses related to travel and research stay at a foreign institution or related to home-based digital access to archives and other scholarly materials.
To apply for the EAAS Scholars-at-Risk Grant, an applicant needs to fill in this application form, describing their proposed projects which can be related to their research, teaching at a university in one of European countries and aiming at establishing new academic initiatives between the grantee and their host institution in Europe. The application has to include an estimated budget. Applicants seeking travel grants to foreign institutions are expected to submit an invitation issued by the host institution; applicants seeking funds for a home-based digital access to archives and other materials, are expected to submit a recommendation letter from their home institution.
EAAS cannot help the applicants in arranging visas for the countries in which their host institution is.
An applicant can apply for this scholarship once per year.
The grants will be awarded three times per year. The deadline for applications for 2022 are: June 30, September 1, November 15.
Please send the application form (with all the necessary documents included) by email attachment to the address: aleksandra.izgarjan@ff.uns.ac.rs.